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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Posted on 01/16/2003 9:17:47 AM PST by BruceS
ARLINGTON, Va. -- When Army Special Forces Sgt. Denis McCarthy returned from hunting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan (news - web sites) to his career here as a financial analyst and to his schoolteacher wife, Eli, the homecoming was bittersweet.
''You're waiting for that Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman moment where you get off the plane and go run into each other's arms and hug and kiss, and it's like the movies,'' says McCarthy, 34, a member of the West Virginia National Guard who spent six months in combat near the Pakistani border.
''It's not,'' the part-time soldier says. His service in Afghanistan was part of 11 months on active duty away from home.
When 28-year-old Elizabeth ''Eli'' (pronounced Ellie) McCarthy pulled up to the curb at Dulles International Airport last fall, rushed and harried after learning late of her husband's impending arrival, she and Denis hugged and kissed.
But after spending their third year of marriage separated by war, there was -- they both could sense it -- an emotional distance, an awkwardness, the shock of being in one another's presence after so long and a sense of starting their togetherness all over again.
''I felt like he was a stranger,'' Eli says. ''He felt so hurt. And I felt so guilty for him feeling hurt.''
Their lives today revolve around the near certainty he will return to combat somewhere within the next year. With America at war with terrorism and possibly at war with Iraq in the weeks ahead, the nation relies increasingly on citizen soldiers such as Denis McCarthy, who are members of either the National Guard or the Reserves.
Before Sept. 11, they were much more civilian than soldier. About 130,000 have been called up since the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., and that includes 58,894 who remain on active duty today. An additional 100,000 could be mobilized for a war with Iraq. A relatively small number are in true combat, although all are at varying risk of terrorist attack.
As a ready source of manpower, Guard and Reserve men and women are a bargain. They number more than 1.2 million and allow the nation to nearly double its armed forces if necessary while accounting for just 8.3% of the defense budget.
Last December, in remarks to American troops stationed in Qatar, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that ''the Guard and the Reserve is so enormously important to this country because it does enable us to have a total force concept.''
But unlike their active-duty counterparts, these citizen soldiers who are being called up increasingly find themselves between two worlds.
They work and even fight in a military that is taking casualties in places such as Afghanistan, dealing with all the wartime trappings of separation and sorrow. But their spouses and children, who were never part of a self-supporting military culture the way most active-service families are, remain in a civilian world where neighbors and friends have long since put away the flags they flew after 9/11 and are going about their daily lives.
Eli, who teaches English literature and journalism at Stonewall Jackson High School in Manassas, Va., says that she would hear from Denis by satellite phone for a fleeting five minutes once every week to 10 days. She never had any idea when he would call, sometimes missed his calls and then would cry for hours. Sometimes she could hear rocketing in the background from Taliban or al-Qaeda efforts to lob explosives close to the Special Forces encampment.
Denis would reassure her in their brief time on the line and try to listen to her frustrations. And when the call was over, there was no one in her Arlington civilian world who could possibly understand.
''Every once in a while,'' she says candidly, curled up on the floor of the couple's living room, ''you hated your friends, and you hated your neighbors, and you hated your family. Because they would discuss the normal problems of life, and they still used you as their sounding board, about a fight they had with their boyfriend or some fender bender or a credit-card debt.
''And part of me was like: 'Who the hell cares?' ''
For her, a new reality
Everything in her civilian world paled by comparison to her new reality. Four weeks after Denis joined his 12-man team in an outpost near Khost, another guardsman and member of the same 19th Special Forces Group was killed with three other American soldiers while trying to dispose of an unexploded rocket near Kandahar.
Six weeks later, one of Denis' friends, Gene Arden Vance Jr., a bicycle shop manager from Morgantown W.Va., a sergeant in the same Guard unit, died in an ambush. Twenty-six Americans have been killed in combat there.
''I can't tell you how many times the doorbell rang, and I closed my eyes and said, 'Please don't let it be a priest and a cop standing there,' '' Eli recalls. ''It's a new fear.''
Threshold issues for reservists on active duty historically have been about placing a career on hold, often dealing with military pay scales far lower than their civilian incomes and scrambling for interim health insurance coverage.
But under this current call-up, when assignments are longer than ever because the war on terrorism is an ongoing fight, there can be a host of emotional issues involving children, marriages and the sudden transition from combat back to office cubicle.
''You have people who are willing to give whatever their country asks . . . while also trying to live the American dream,'' says Jay Farrar, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and a former Marine Corps officer and Department of Defense (news - web sites) official.
''They're the ones in the middle,'' he says. ''And most other Americans don't have a clue.''
Today, there are 13,000 members of the Guard and Reserves either voluntarily or involuntarily serving well beyond a year on active duty. It is the first time the Army has used individual reservists that continuously since Vietnam, and the Air Force has not done so since Korea.
Federal law safeguards the civilian job of a guardsman or reservist on active duty, although employers are not required to continue pay, contribute to a pension plan or provide health insurance while the employee is mobilized.
In a letter to Rumsfeld last year, Republican congressman David Hobson of Ohio complained that people who joined the Reserves and National Guard in the past did so with an understanding that periods of active duty would be ''relatively short.''
''Part-time reservists are being turned into full-time soldiers and airmen through extended and unpredictable active-duty assignments,'' Hobson says. ''The services are not properly manned to conduct this new type of war in which we now find ourselves, and the Reserves are bearing the brunt.''
For Eli McCarthy in her two-story colonial in Arlington, where she ran up the Stars and Stripes and tied a yellow ribbon on the flagpole, the war on terror always was tugging at her sleeve.
Her emotional state was a montage of bitterness, resentment, longing and intense pride.
''This wasn't his life,'' she says of her husband breaking the news to her, over drinks he mixed back in November 2001, that he would be deployed to Afghanistan. ''He has a life. He works for Host Marriott. He's a financial analyst. His life is here with me.''
Friends were hesitant to mention Denis, as if bringing up a death in the family, and there were few people with whom she could seek solace.
She and Denis had been together for five years, and while he was away, Eli became a single person again, a fifth wheel at dinners. She cleaned and organized and reorganized the house. She visited girlfriends, attended weddings, stayed busy. At school, where her students knew of her plight, they leaped to their feet to say the Pledge of Allegiance with her each morning as kindred patriots.
But Eli couldn't lose the bitter taste in her mouth.
''You would watch Saturday Night Live (news - Y! TV), and they would have these funny little skits about Osama (bin Laden),'' she recalls. ''Well, it wasn't funny to me at all. Because Osama at any moment could come face to face with my husband and kill him.''
For him, no guaranteed survival
For Denis, 7,000 miles away, it was a dark-side journey where the lessons were indelible.
He learned that his 12 years of Special Forces training were both indispensable on the battlefield and, because of the indiscriminate nature of warfare violence, no guarantee of survival.
Members of the team would venture out of their safe house compound in Toyota pickups three to seven times a week on missions to hunt down wanted Taliban or al-Qaeda, seize weaponry or conduct reconnaissance. As team medic, Denis dug a hunk of shrapnel from the knee of a trooper wounded by a mine explosion. He witnessed a fellow medic take a bullet to the face that shattered the man's jaw during a reconnaissance patrol. Denis slept with his M-4 assault carbine hanging from a hook inches over his head.
''There were definitely times when I was more scared than I have ever been in my life,'' Denis says. ''I learned that no matter what people say about combat or about war, that you can never explain it right. You can't put it into words.''
He and his colleagues sweltered in the 110- to 120-degree summer heat and grimaced through chronic stomach and intestinal ailments. They were frustrated over their inability to chase retreating enemy across the border into Pakistani sanctuary. And Denis learned how the complexities of global warfare distill to a single, unalloyed truth when you are the one holding the rifle: ''We just have to live every day. All we have to do is keep breathing until somebody says we can go home.''
There were lessons once he came home, too. There were nightmares, flashes of being unable to escape incoming rocket rounds.
And the elaborate dance of being together again: the dinners out that were almost like dating and the shyness initially at being in the bedroom together. Denis sensed he was violating her established routines. She felt as if he were a visitor prowling the premises. Eli would keep forgetting to alert Denis of her plans, because she was so used to making decisions without him. Denis was impatient for things to get back the way they were.
And he was learning that was impossible. ''The reality is, you're not the same as much as you want to be, and neither is she.''
It is a marriage slowly coming together again, though deep problems persist. They have argued heatedly about having a child. Denis wants to begin trying, but Eli is fearful he will be called up again and does not want to go through that alone.
''In a way, the Army has put our life on hold,'' she says. ''In a way, this war has put our life on hold. And in a way, I'm keeping our life on hold because I fear the lack of a future.''
Denis, from the moment he entered the National Guard, saw the part-time service as a tribute to his country. Mobilization tested that commitment, he concedes. But if called again, he would go. ''I want to do the right thing,'' he says.
For Eli, it's a life in limbo.
''To kind of have Iraq just sitting there on the horizon so ominous, it's heartbreaking to me,'' she says, ''I'm proud of what he did. And I'll be proud if he has to go back again. I believe in what they're doing. I know they're doing the right thing.
''It's just that if we're not recognized for it, if people don't stop and say, 'Thank you,' then it just seems for naught in a way.''
Thank you to all those serving, active and reserve, and especially to their families.
That said, when I was in, there were noises about forming support groups, etc. in case of mobilization. What happened? Did someone decide it would cost too much to support our citizen soldiers?
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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. . . . . . . Johnny Gage MEGA PING . . . . . . .
Freep mail me if you want off my list
I am still wondering why retired guardsmen have to wait til 61 to draw ANY pension at all...skimmed down as it is.....
its a pension that is only proportional to the time they put in, yet the retired guardsmen get nothing until 61..
I can say that as a retired guardsman wife...that it is much more than the weekend and the two weeks in the summer...its really full-time readiness at part-time pay, without the benefits such as medical, dental, vacation pay, etc etc.....
but its the retirement that really is galling....
This was also said during the Vietnam War. Life continues on back in "the world". Guess it's true no matter which war you're talking about...
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